The Banquet That Built the Oscars

In the spring of 1927, the movies were booming — and still slightly disreputable. To give Hollywood the respectability its box office deserved, MGM chief Louis B. Mayer invited the industry's elite to dinner. On May 11, 1927, in the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, some 300 guests sat down to a banquet that would change film history: the founding dinner of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The articles of incorporation had been filed on May 4, and at an organizational meeting on May 6 the founders had chosen their first president: Douglas Fairbanks, the athletic, grinning swashbuckler who was then the biggest star in the world. But May 11 was the night the Academy truly came alive. The first membership roster — 230 names — was printed that evening, and the Academy bestowed its first honorary membership on Thomas Edison, the man whose inventions had made the movies possible.

The founders organized themselves into five branches — Producers, Actors, Directors, Writers, and Technicians — each member paying $100 to join. Their stated purpose was harmony: mediating labor disputes and burnishing the young industry's image. Over time the Academy drifted away from labor arbitration and became what it is today, an honorary organization. But one early committee, formed to consider "awards of merit," would outgrow everything else.

Less than two years later, on May 16, 1929, the Academy held the first presentation of those awards at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Two hundred seventy guests, a fifteen-minute ceremony, and the first Best Picture prize went to the World War I epic Wings. The little gold statuette handed out that night — a knight gripping a crusader's sword, standing on a reel of film — would become the most famous trophy on earth: the Oscar. Winners were announced to the press months in advance in those early years, so there was no suspense; nobody minded, because simply being honored by one's peers was still a novelty.

Mayer's dinner-party gamble paid off beyond anything he imagined.

What began as a dinner to make the movies respectable ended up making them immortal. The Academy now counts thousands of members, and its awards can make or break careers overnight. Every year, when the world tunes in to watch the envelopes opened, it is watching the long shadow of a banquet held at the Biltmore on May 11, 1927.

Photo: Harris & Ewing, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).